Locket: More than human public intimacy in digital contexts

This article argues for the role of digital technologies in cultivating an ethic of attention and responsibility which act as gateways for climate action. The paper traces a closed-network photography app, Locket, as a digital method of capturing and archiving small, ephemeral moments of more-than-human public intimacy. Through image analysis of these moments of tenderness, this article highlights opportunities for bearing witness. These acts of noticing lead to opportunities for connection which are essential for sustainable climate action. This article investigates scale as a key barrier to mobilising individuals to undertake climate action, as global existential dread conflicts with a perspective that prioritises individual impacts and everyday practices as non-accumulative. Rather than succumb to apathy when confronted with the colossal and fearsome scale of climate disaster, sites of micro-public intimacy reduce the scope even further than the individual, for example to a single object contained in the lens of a smartphone camera. In this microcosm, human and more-than-human actors are regarded as objects of beauty or curiosity worthy of being archived. Small acts of witnessing and treasuring can serve as springboards for climate action in other ways which refute problems of scale and feelings of apathy.